Indie journalist Marisa Kabas took on the news cycle — and won

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A week ago, Marisa Kabas, the independent journalist behind The Handbasket, broke the news that the Office of Management and Budget had sent a memo to staff ordering a pause on billions of dollars of funding in grants, loans and financial assistance to programs. Soon after, mainstream outlets picked up the story and, two days later, the order was rescinded.

If you’re not familiar with Kabas’ work, she launched The Handbasket on Substack in 2022 as a side-project that grew into her main gig a year later. She quickly racked up a dedicated following as she covered former Congressman George Santos, the police raid on a small Kansas newspaper and documented Elon Musk’s antisemitism. In 2024, she led a movement of writers decamping from Substack (her newsletter is now hosted by beehiiv) in protest of the platform’s unwillingness to break off ties with purveyors of disinformation and hate speech.

Kabas got the funding freeze story when she was emailed directly by a source inside the Office of Personnel Management. We exchanged messages today about how what happened next was different from what might have happened in a traditional newsroom.

“It helped that I trusted my source implicitly, so I asked some follow-up questions to make sure I was certain of what the email meant and then shared it on Bluesky,” Kabas told me. “At a larger organization, I highly doubt they would've allowed a reporter to break a story that big on social media – they would've waited to post it on their actual site. Which is what the Washington Post did three hours later.”

Traditional newsrooms follow institutionalized internal processes before breaking news, and in many cases, crediting an outside reporter — particularly an independent one — may not even be part of the consideration.

“Not a single mainstream outlet reached out to me before publishing on their sites,” Kabas said. “The Post credited me right away; The New York Times didn’t until I emailed the reporter and asked him to make an update; others like CNN did not credit me at all.”

In her newsletter, Kabas wrote about the vulnerability of being first on a major story as a solo journalist.

“I think that despite the fact that I’ve proven to myself and to my readers that I have good news instincts, it can still be challenging to have the confidence to report a story with such far-reaching impact,” she wrote. “Despite trusting my source implicitly, I still hesitated.”

Kabas operates without the traditional safety net of a newsroom, relying instead on her own credibility, instincts and relationships with her sources.

“A few misconceptions about independent journalists is that our fact-finding and fact-checking processes aren't as rigorous as corporate outlets, that our sources couldn’t possibly be as good, and that because we don’t have official press passes that we don’t have access to credible information,” Kabas said. “In reality, it’s not as much about being in the room where it happens as it is about having sources in the room where it happens who trust you enough to tell you the full story.”

Kabas’ audience trusts her, too. Like other independent journalists, Kabas cultivates a relationship with an audience that values direct, unfiltered reporting with a clear point of view. Independent journalists earn that trust with every post, every newsletter and every story. Their readers become their stakeholders, investing not just money but belief in their ability to deliver news that matters. And, as Kabas' experience shows, that trust is rewarded when an audience recognizes the risks and efforts that go into her reporting.

The trust Kabas has built with sources and audience is paying off. Since the story broke, even more federal employees are reaching out to her share tips and narratives of thier lives within the chaos unfolding at federal agencies.

“The volume of messages has been astonishing,” said Kabas. “I’m reading every single one of them as carefully as possible, which means I’m reading basically all the time. I’m really tired. I broke a story at 1:30 a.m. Monday, went to sleep around 3 and have been up since 8 reading tips. It’s a lot, but in a way it helps calm anxiety because I feel like I’m helping in some small way.”

Kabas told The Associated Press that her paid subscribers, who she relies on not only to pay her rent, but fund her reporting, went from 800 to 1,500 in a week. And although this story introduced Kabas to a wider audience, this wasn’t a fluke or a one-time viral moment. Kabas is one of many independent journalists steadily building loyal followings outside the constraints of traditional media as trust in the old guard continues to erode.

While the AP cited Kabas, Casey Newton and Seamus Hughes as members of the rising tide of independent creator-model journalists building a vital new future for the flow of news and information, they looked to Greg Munno, a journalism professor at Syracuse University, to put Kabas’ work in perspective:

“She’s got attitude, she’s got personality,” said Munno. “I think attitude and personality help these independent journalists connect with readers and potentially sources.”

He goes on: “I don’t think the consumer’s appetite for news is high enough to support a really deep pool of independent journalists that would be able to create an audience and make a living.”

So independent journalism is bold, engaging – but not sustainable? That seems to be the misleading takeaway here.

Luckily, a 93-year-old journalist gets it.

On Thursday, Dan Rather posted this to his Facebook page: “Independent journalism is now the way forward. Sadly, we can no longer rely on legacy media to hold the powerful accountable.”

P.S. In the interest of helping a fellow journalist out, I’m sending Professor Munno a gift subscription to Project C.

the latest

• Bryan Schott, an independent journalist covering Utah politics, is suing the state of Utah after he was denied press credentials to cover the state’s legislature in what he says was a punitive move based on his reporting. The former Salt Lake Tribune reporter’s suit could be decided Wednesday.

• The White House was flooded with thousands of applications after press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced a "new media" pass for “independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers, and content creators.” On day one, the two seats reserved for new media went, ironically, to Breitbart and Axios’ founder Mike Allen.

• Jim Acosta is the latest MSM big name to announce an exit, in this case from CNN, to launch his own Substack, “The Jim Acosta Show.” As of this writing he’s racked up 165K followers, Professor Munno.

• Conservative commentator Candace Owens is launching a multi-platform women’s media brand, reports Taylor Lorenz.

  

know things

• Two YouTube insiders sat down for a 21-minute video to unpack how the YouTube algorithm works in 2025. Key takeaways:

  • The algorithm doesn’t “push” videos. Instead, it pulls content based on each viewer’s habits rather than just video performance.

  • There’s no single magic metric; CTR, watch time, and engagement all matter differently depending on the content type and viewing context.

  • With AI-driven recommendations becoming more sophisticated, the system now understands not just topics but nuanced content elements like style, intent, and audience fit.

• Substack announced the expansion of Substack Defender, a fund that offers subsidized legal support to independent journalists working on their platform. Legal support is also a part of the support package offered by beehiiv as part of their soon-to-be-annouced Media Collective.

• Boring Stuff, a new back office solution for creators, promises to handle accounting, taxes, payroll and other operational tasks that can tend to overwhelm creators. This isn’t an endorsement. I haven’t done the due diligence to vet Boring Stuff, but plan to. Is anyone out there using Boring Stuff? Or are you more of a Quickbooks Solopreneur fan? Or still just doing it all yourself? Write me at [email protected] and let me know how you’re handling your admin. I may quote you in an upcoming post. // Related: Turbo Tax shared these tax tips for content creators.

• The Press-Gazette ranks Substack’s biggest earners. (Note, some big names are conspicuously absent here because they don’t publish their subscriber numbers. Per their analysis of publicly-available data, politics (which legacy publishing sales teams perennial cite as “unsellable”) is the biggest driver of subscription revenue:

I leave you with this

Becca Farsace on how it’s going about six months into going solo:

becca.farsace

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